Welcome Back, Blogger. ;)

Check.

Check.

......Is this thing on?

Hello, Orange & Salt readers! I've missed you. Where have I been? Well, you can choose from a long, long list of excuses, including but not limited to: working at my job, working in the studio, enjoying the beautiful winter weather, hiking, biking, participating in an art show, knitting, walking my dog, frantically filling Christmas Etsy orders, blogging for my job, decorating my house for Christmas, and also somewhat frantically preparing for a cross-town move immediately post-Christmas. Whew. But they're all excuses, dear readers, what can I say? Eventually, I knew I'd have to return to the blog. I missed you all too much. :)

So here it is, in photos, a brief history of the last few weeks to get us up to speed:

There was ravioli, made with fresh, handmade pasta and a sausage filling with cheese and arugula. Served tossed lightly in brown butter and sprinkled with pecans. The recipe for this is, I assure you, coming soon.

There was fancy dinner at my parents' house, during which all manner of bizarre cooking and feeding rituals took place.

At fancy dinner, we fancily dined upon crispy paprika chickpeas, golden rolled spinach & feta phyllo cigars, pan-sauteed ribeyes with pommes dauphinois (a la Dad), and an amazing dark chocolate hazelnut tart. Because this family is fancy indeed.

Then, at some point, there was my first taste of gizzards. Gizzards: a true revelation......and almost as much fun to say as they are to eat! Try it: 'Honey, what's for dinner?' 'GIZZARDS. Gizzards are for dinner.' 'Gizzards??' 'GIZZARDS.' It's hours of fun, especially when you add funny accents.

Chewy, with strangely dark & hidden depths, gizzards are full of fatty flavor (especially when dredged in flour and fried until golden and crispy) and a faintly organlike whiff about them. I can't explain it, but they're truly addictive. Kind of like evil McNuggets. We took them to a friend's tapas party and ate them dipped in ketchup and sriracha sauce, a mixture I cannot recommend highly enough.

In November, Mike and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary (aawwwwwww!!) with an amazing dinner at The Mission in Scottsdale, a 'modern Latin' restaurant. Something else I can't recommend highly enough: dinner at The Mission. Seriously. I've been scheming excuses to go back ever since we left, it's that wonderful. Pictured above: my appetizer, roast corn gorditas loaded with squash, zucchini, corn, crema, and huitlacoche.........YES, you read that right, blackened corn fungus. Infected corn! It's not often that this pops up on menus, but I've always yearned to try it, and it didn't disappoint. It's earthy, as you'd expect, with a trufflelike identity. Those of us who love the fungus family (I'm definitely among that number) will adore this one.

Not pictured: Mike's appetizer, the succulent (yes, so succulent that I am actually forced to use that word to describe these) duck carnitas empanadas. I stole as much of this as he would allow before he began defending himself with his fork and steak knife. I tried. :)

Also shown above: my entree, the outrageously, plate-lickingly good (seriously, I'd had a fair amount of Argentinian red wine by this point, and may or may not have actually licked my plate when no one was looking, I'm not telling) chorizo porchetta with rosemary, served with white bean puree and sweet garlic crema. I howled with despair when the side order of puree and crema disappeared, it was that amazing. And Mike's entree of braised short ribs with chorizo, black beans and pureed plantain and sweet potato, plus the dessert of crispy chocolate and cinnamon churros, dipped in an espresso milkshake.........ohhhh. Well, I can't wait to go back. I just can't wait. Anyone up for dinner? Call me.

For Thanksgiving, there was pie. Sweet, caramel apple pie in homemade pastry, with festive autumn leaf designs. For that extra Martha touch.

And finally, more often than not, there was just simple food shared at a warm and loving table. Like soup, humble tomato soup with a touch of cream and a lively sprinkling of fresh basil. Although I admittedly love the big, fancy blowout 'event' dinners we've made and participated in along the way, this is ultimately my favorite kind of meal to share. A simple bowl of warm tomato soup.

It tastes like love. :)

Simple Tomato Soup

(serves 4-6 portions....add crusty bread for dipping and it's a full, hearty meal)

2 28 oz. cans of diced tomatoes in tomato juice (since it's winter. However, if tomatoes are in season, feel free to use fresh)

1 32 oz. box of chicken stock

extra virgin olive oil

1 cup diced yellow onion

1/2 tablespoon crushed garlic

1 tsp. dried oregano

splash of Worcestershire or soy sauce

half pint of heavy cream

pinch of sugar

salt & pepper

fresh basil

Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in large skillet over medium heat, add onion and saute until soft and beginning to brown. Add half the garlic and saute quickly for 30 seconds. Add one can of tomatoes, including juice, increase heat to high and bring mixture to a boil while stirring constantly. Add oregano and a splash of either Worcestershire or soy sauce (sounds crazy, but it adds a hidden, deep dark note of savory umami that will be noticeable--though subtle--all the way through), reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the pan. The mixture should be visibly darker and reduced at this point.

Add mixture to large stockpot with chicken stock and remaining can of tomatoes. Puree with immersion blender (or process in batches in a standard blender; because you have cooled the mixture by adding the room temperature ingredients, this should be fairly easy at this point). Add the remaining garlic, bring back to a boil in stockpot, then reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for 30 more minutes.

Remove from heat and add sugar (to balance the acidity of the tomatoes), salt and pepper to taste. Add cream to taste (this soup is wonderful in different ways both with cream and without; how much you add, anywhere from a tablespoon to the full half pint, is up to you. We won't tell if you add all the cream, though.).

Serve immediately, topped with fresh chopped basil. Spoon up the love!

'Smitten' with Warm Mushroom and Arugula Salad........

It should come as no surprise that, as a food blogger, I read other food blogs. Clotilde's Chocolate & Zucchini arouses a little Parisian frisson every time I read a new entry (and you have to love a good ampersand), David Lebovitz always inspires, I have read the entire famed 'Julie/Julia Project' blog from virtual cover to cover, and Deb's smitten kitchen and Molly's Orangette very often make me actually laugh out loud. Even the venerable Judith Jones (she of discovering-Julia-Child fame) blogs, for God's sake, and the woman is in her mid-80s! There's a wealth of food bloggery out there for the taking, the reading, and the (pardon the inexcusable food pun) digesting. And yet I read somewhere that most people don't actually use the wonderful recipes they come across online via food blogs; most people are in it largely for the breathless thrill of food porn alone. Whatever takes your fancy, I've been guilty of the same in the past......but when we're backed up against the wall over here with no dinner ideas in sight, and our imaginations fail us, we turn to three possible sources: The Library, The Files, or The Blogs.

The Library, as the name suggests, refers to Mike's and my collection of cookbooks. No tidy, Dewey decimal'ed shelf of books is this, but rather a sprawling, uneven clutch of books whose epicenter is the far corner of our small kitchen. Hardcovers, paperbacks, large and small books and pamphlets of all kinds squat together, punctuated by the occasional corner of a white sheet of paper protruding from a book, on which might be a handscrawled recipe for cornbread from Mike's dad, or printed out instructions from Alton Brown on how to construct the perfect holiday turkey from all the way brining to roasting. A pickling cookbook sits next to one specifically for soup, a book of traditional Austrian recipes nestles between Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook and Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook, and even Julia Child and Martha Stewart manage to bunk decently together without any elbowing or girlish hair-pulling.

The Files, as they are so vaguely referred to, represent years' worth of pulled recipes from magazines of all sorts that long ago met their fate in the recycling bin. These include such venerable publications as the New York Times Sunday magazine, Food & Wine and Bon Appetit, but also Every Day with Rachel Ray (what can I say? She's had some good recipes) and even the now-defunct JANE magazine (R.I.P.). When I see a recipe I'm likely to try (or even one I'd like to think I'll get around to, you know, someday), I pull it for The Files. Don't let the name fool you. Much like The Library, The Files are no glossy, organized affair, but an unbound, messy, sliding stack of loose magazine pages that have occupied various spots in the house and occasionally gets lost (as it did a few weeks ago when we misplaced the whole stack somehow and were desperately searching for a certain treasured jerk chicken recipe that was certain the be in The Files.....if only we could have found them! Alas.). The Files currently occupy one corner of a low ottoman in the dining room, next to some back issues of the Times and empty boxes we are saving one at a time for our move. At least, I think.



Finally, we also sometimes turn to The Blogs, a category which includes all the blogs I listed above plus many, many others. And it was in turning to The Blogs this past Monday that I found this gem via smitten kitchen: Warm Mushroom Salad with Hazelnuts (original recipe can be found here). My heart went pitter-pat. Warm mushrooms! Hazelnuts! Peppery greens and slivers of sharp pecorino! I had to have it, exactly as Deb suggested, with a slice of crusty bread alongside it and a warm poached egg snuggled on top. I even baked a loaf of bread specifically to have some on hand to go with this salad.

After making a few substitutions (okay, I hesitate to say 'compromises'), the tale of the warm mushroom salad had a happy ending.....it was delicious! I used grated parmesan as the cheese, formerly-dried morels and baby portobellos instead of an assortment of fresh wild mushrooms, and pecans stood in for expensive hazelnuts (oh, for the day we move to Oregon, where the streets are paved with hazelnuts and fresh morels!), it's true. But once the runny golden yolk of the poached egg was pierced and spread silkily throughout the warm innards of the salad, I was hooked on the nutty, rich, crunchy flavors. A little compromise worked out just fine in this case. With crusty bread in hand, I wiped the plate clean, readers.